R.I. candidate questioned on Twitter

A primary challenger in a tight Rhode Island congressional race has nearly 1 million Twitter followers — more than Mitt Romney — but he’s not talking about how he amassed such a staggering social media fan base in a short span of time.

In February alone, Democrat Anthony Gemma, who is running even in polls against first-term Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), added 400,000 Twitter followers, according to social media monitoring sites. On Facebook, meanwhile, fans of his campaign page ballooned from 3,414 to 107,614 during the same time period.

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Gemma now has more than 519,000 Facebook fans —10 times more fans than the number of votes he received in his 2010 primary loss to Cicilline. It’s a seat Patrick Kennedy held for eight terms in a heavily Democratic area, and this time Gemma has a better shot because Cicilline’s approval ratings are spectacularly low.

But the small-town plumbing executive and self-described “social media guru” declined through his campaign staff to explain how he accumulated so many social media followers so fast. “The campaign does not comment on our social media strategy,” campaign spokesman Alex Morash said in an email.

Other candidates recently have been caught up in allegations that their campaigns were buying Twitter followers, including Romney and Newt Gingrich. That’s relatively easy to do online, costs only pennies apiece and is not illegal — only in violation of Facebook and Twitter terms of service.

But an oversized social footprint that suggests mass appeal can be embarrassing for a campaign should it be revealed.

"If a candidate abuses the appropriate channels to gin up their followings, they risk hurting their reputation as a grass-roots candidate," said Amy Brown, a digital campaign strategist with Harris Media LLC who has worked with several national candidates.

Fewer than 1 percent of Gemma’s Twitter followers are based in Rhode Island, but 14 percent are in Canada, according to Michael Hussey, CEO of PeekAnalytics, one of two independent social media research firms that provided POLITICO data on Gemma. Many of his followers’ profile photos are racy and their hometowns include cities such as Istanbul and Karachi, Pakistan.

Furthermore, Gemma seems to have a surprisingly low level of engagement. On Feb. 24, the same day he picked up more than 87,000 followers, he asked his audience to retweet a photo; only six did.

“This is a Rhode Island politician,” Hussey said. “Why would a Rhode Island politician who nobody knows outside of the Providence metropolitan area have 2 percent of his followers from London or 3 percent to the state of Georgia?”

Wildfire Social Media Marketing, a firm that “scrapes” Facebook and Twitter daily to log changes in thousands of accounts, shows that the Twitter handle @ AnthonyGemma gained more than 400,000 followers in February alone — despite a modest amount of tweeting and no watershed event to precipitate it.

Likewise, the Facebook page for “Anthony Gemma For Congress” experienced a whopping 31-fold increase in the same span. His personal page, Anthony Gemma, did even better, skyrocketing by Feb. 29 to 169,468 fans, up 5,600 percent from the end of January.

By the time Gemma announced his candidacy in mid-April, Gemma had just over 1 million Twitter followers. His personal Facebook page had 338,000 fans and the campaign had 107,000 fans. Today those figures stand at 519,000 for his personal page and 106,000 for the campaign page.

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CORRECTION: Corrected by: Andrea Drusch @ 07/26/2012 03:55 PM
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the number of Twitter followers Romney had and the number of Facebook fans Gemma had as of publication. It also misstated how many people retweeted Gemma’s tweet Tuesday. As of publication, 17 had.